Published February 7th, 2010 at 2:09 am in Music News, Record Crack with no comments
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Southerly is the name Krist Krueger records under, and this Portland, Oregon artist is steering clear of any sophomore slump with the release of Champion Of The Noisy Negativists. It will be released on vinyl through People In A Position To Know Recordings and digital-only (i.e. no CD) through Self Group. Southerly will be going on a European tour to support the album, you can look at confirmed dates by clicking here.
Apparently Southerly (no relation to the Arthur Lee pseudonum of Arthurly) is into creating soundscapes and textures, and along with using the human voice to tell stories, he likes to cater to that need of creating noises just for the hell of it, but in a distinctive way. You can download for free a song called “Trials” (5.82mb) to hear a hint of how he does it.
Published February 7th, 2010 at 1:08 am in Record Crack with 1 comments
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I have been a fan of records for as long as I can remember. Some of my first memories involved music, and that meant going into my garage and seeing a Santana album in the phonograph, or having my dad sing Johnny Nash‘s “I Can See Clearly Now” or John Rowles‘ “Cheryl Moana Marie” to me as I sat on the fishtank while I glanced at the labels spinning on the record player, or maybe going to my uncle’s house next door and being freaked out by how scary the covers for Black Sabbath‘s Master Of Reality or Led Zeppelin‘s Houses Of The Holy were. I embraced the 8-track, got into cassettes, loved what the compact disc represented, saw people use reel-to-reel tape machines, wanted to use DAT and mini-disc players, discovered the underground joy of being able to download a song as an MP3, and then discovering how it was possible to download lossless files that were equal to the sound of a CD but at half the size. At the core of the coming and going of these formats is the music, and that’s how it should be.
I am very much an 80′s kid, and yet I have always been fascinated with my discoveries in the 1970′s and in that decade, things in the years where I was too young to care. As I approach my 40th year on this planet, I have seen the rise and fall and rise again of a format that I hold dear to my heart: vinyl. The record. Platter. In the early 80′s the cassette became the format of choice, it was compact and convenient. The first Sony Walkman’s were big and bulky but it meant listening to your tapes while walking to school, catching the bus, or (in my case) at the beach. When they made the first Walkman’s that were as “thin” as a cassette case, it felt like nothing could be better. Everyone could release cassettes, whether you had them professionally made or had enough to record a few songs for a demonstration tape. Everyone used cassettes, it was the cheapest way to get as many songs as possible when you recorded them off the radio. As cassettes had taken over the world, the compact disc made itself known to the public around 1982. The idea of being able to play two sides of a record in one sitting, without walking to your record player or flipping it over, seemed insane. You could actually sit and listen to 40 to 45 minutes of music at once? The only way you could do that was if you had a phonograph where you stacked up the records on a spindle, or knew how to make custom cassettes. The first compact disc players, which you could only see in specialty rooms at stereo/audio stores, were $2000+. Yes, plus. I remember when my dad went into such a room at the Ward Warehouse in Honolulu. I’m not sure how he heard of it or if he just wanted to look at stereos, and the guy there simply wanted to do a demo. I remember being blown away at seeing a shiny disc move at a really fast speed (500 revolutions per minute) and playing music. We were told it was done without a needle. WHOA! I loved it, and dreamed of maybe having a CD player someday.
Despite the trends and convenience, I have always held to my admiration for the record. It has imperfections, but at its best, it’s at its best. In other words, it’s a great format to listen to music: giant artwork, cool design, and if recorded, mixed, and mastered properly, it can sound incredible.
The 00′s has been an uncertain decade for the music industry, with some claiming quality control went out the window on everything from sound quality to choice of artists being pushed in the mainstream. The rush to embrace the MP3 format made people toss out all of their CD’s, just as millions tossed out their records tapes in the mid to late 80′s to replace their collections with shiny discs. New and “better” technology has always lead to this pattern, but while CD sales are going down, the industry discovered that vinyl sales are going up. Older audiences are re-discovering what they loved about records in the first place, and younger audiences are finding that records are cool, something perhaps from an older, slower time. What was once considered outdated and obsolete continued to be championed by fans of the format. As record players and turntables were spotted in various aspects of pop culture, from department store TV ads, to finding a home in the living rooms of such shows as The Simpsons and Family Guy, and even a little Hawaiian girl playing her Elvis Presley 45′s in her room in Lilo & Stitch, that made people of all ages why this “record thing” is still embraced. Now a younger generation are discovering it for themselves, and it’s great to know that awareness exists. However, as I do searches on forums, blogs, and on Twitter, there’s a lot that isn’t known by vinyl newbies.. This is where I hope Record Crack will come to the rescue.
I’ve bean a record collector for 30 years. It began with simply having parents and family buy me records and accumulating them. Sitting down with a record as I listened, I looked at the cover, the inner sleeve, and I read the liner notes and credits. I wanted to know more about what I was hearing, reading, and seeing, so I went out of my way to seek that information. There was a record store in Honolulu called Strawberry Fields Forever and I discovered a magazine called Goldmine, decided to record collecting. Ten years after reading my first issue, I would become a contributing writer for them for about two years. What moved me from a fan of listening to someone who wanted to collect and archive music was an article by Wayne Harada in the Honolulu Advertiser on November 3, 1983. The idea of having records that may be of value seemed incredible, that I might find a record with a misspelling which someone wanted for 200 or more dollars: sign me up. As you collect, you also listen and learn, and doing research through records only leads to one thing: more records. That in itself became a joy, and my hobby. The seeds had been planted.
Record Crack will look into various aspects of records and record collecting, what to look out for, what to avoid. I’ll also touch on the terms of the hobby, how to spot and know what an “original pressing” is, the value of a reissue, why some collectors look for non-domestic pressings. I’ll also go into the weird size of record collecting, because with every copy of Boston‘s first album that can be found at countless thrift stores and garage sales, there’s a heap of records that someone felt a need to release. That need to be heard is what moves me to find the oddities, so I’ll cover them too.
It will not be just analog fetishism here, there are many online resources that you can go to in order to find more information, podcasts that cater to being vinyl-only, and how all of this record attention is being translated in the 21st century. Many are archiving their record collections to CD, MP3, WAV and lossless files, and even high quality DVD-Audio discs/files, and I’ll touch on how to preserve your music that way. I want to be able to pass along what I know, and I want to learn too so if I’m incorrect in anything or you feel I need to be aware of something, please respond.
Mahalo nui (thank you) for making Record Crack your place to fulfill your addictive music needs. Bookmark this spot, and let’s venture forward.
(NOTE: Record Crack is a section that will highlight brand new releases on vinyl. It will also be an informative section on articles and links of interest, including news on everything from turntables to anything that’s record/vinyl-related. Articles will be determined simply by the subject line referring to a number, as in “No. 001″. Albums have catalog numbers, so having the articles numbered is a reference to that. At least that’s how I do it until there’s a better system of doing it.)
